This application is the US national phase of international application PCT/GB00/04548 filed Nov. 29, 2000 which designated the U.S.
This invention relates to assessing communication equipment and is suitable particularly, but not exclusively, for testing and/or monitoring network equipment.
The continuing development of networking technology is fundamental to data communication, as this is intrinsic to, among other things, the interconnection of many disparate physical networks, and the transfer of information across multiple information sources. Significant efforts have been, and are continually, directed towards reducing limitations and increasing the flexibility of network equipment, both in the hardware and software areas. However, only a relatively small number of tools that are suitable for testing and evaluating various aspects of both new and existing network equipment have been developed.
Applications that transfer information over networks rely on network equipment to transport data between source and destination address(es), and are wholly dependent on the robustness of the network equipment for successful data transfer. Often, users of such applications experience xe2x80x9cslow network trafficxe2x80x9d, or network failure. An inability to find faults, and to correct for those faults in a reasonable amount of time, can result in significant inconvenience to users and loss of data, and is costly. Thus, if the network equipment could be more effectively monitored, problem areas could be identified, and current levels of inconvenience could be reduced.
New transmission protocols and router technologies affect the way in which data is transferred between applications, and these applications may require to modify aspects of data formatting in order to effect successful sending and receiving of data. At present the tools that are flexible enough to analyse and test new protocols and technologies are either exceedingly expensive or limited in scope. These include tools such as:
xe2x80x9cSmartBits(trademark)xe2x80x9d by NetComm(trademark), which allows a tester to edit all of the fields in the data packets, and to generate and receive traffic from a variety of media types;
xe2x80x9cNetXray(trademark)xe2x80x9d by Cinco(trademark), which is configurable to probe packets travelling on a network using predetermined tests, and report any problems based on predetermined criteria.
According to a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided apparatus for testing and/or monitoring the transmission of data packets by communications equipment, the apparatus comprising:
(i) registering means for registering one or more transmission protocols to enable the apparatus to communicate according to any registered protocol;
(ii) submitting means for submitting a request, the request specifying at least one testing and/or monitoring operation;
(iii) decoding means for decoding a received request into one or more processable events in accordance with one or more predetermined rules;
(iv) read/write means for controlling the writing of data packets to, and the reading of data packets from, the communications equipment; and
(v) scheduling means for scheduling decoding of received requests and execution of the one or more processable events in accordance with the read/write means,
such that, when a request is received from the submitting means, the scheduling means schedules:
a) decoding of the request into one or more processable events by the decoding means;
b) initialisation of the processable events by the decoding means; and
c) reading and writing of data packets from and to the communications equipment by the read/write means in accordance with the processable events.